Long December
by Lirillith
Summary: Tifa and Rude: Bars, fights, and holidays. Now complete.
1. a crowded room

Author's note: I have this whole somewhat tortured line of reasoning that lets me claim they celebrate Christmas and call it that in the world of FF7 - the appearance of the church, for one, and one of the NPCs uses "Jesus" as an epithet, so why shouldn't I make a lousy translation work for me?

* * *

_  
_

The bar's crowded, noisy - there's music somewhere, but he can't identify the source. Most of the volume comes from voices. Reno's holding down a table in the corner, feet in the other chair, and makes a show of not relinquishing his footrest as Rude stands over him. Finally he lets it go, and Rude sits down without a visible sign of exasperation. He's wearing a worn, dark-colored sweatshirt once navy blue, and faded jeans - he hasn't dressed this way in years. Reno looks as messy as ever. Rude can't seem to manage it, even in clothes chosen for the purpose, even after shooting a man in the back of the head and leaving his body in a walk-in freezer. The suit he'd worn for the hit went in a heap of trash in an alley. Some dumpster diver will find them when he's long gone.

It's New Year's Eve. There's still cheap tinsel around the bar, and there was a wreath on the door. He hates Christmas - office parties and sugary music in the background everywhere, and people don't even have the decency to drop it instantly once it's over. Reno gave him a tie, two days late. He gave Reno a flask of bourbon. He just wishes they'd take down the damn wreath.

"Done?" Reno asks.

"Done. You order drinks?"

There's the flask. Reno offers it, and Rude takes a drink, passes it back to him. "Service is pitiful. I was starting to wonder if it was self-serve."

"...only in your fantasy world. I know you've spent more time than that in the slums." The smaller man just shrugs. Rude leans back in his chair and scans the room. There's a jukebox against one wall, but the music he thought he'd heard is coming from a record player sitting on top of it. No wonder they can't get much volume. He sees the bar. He sees the girl. She's looking to someone near her, not facing him, and he sees the right side of her face as it crinkles into a laugh. Dark hair, dark eyes, a red sweater and a pair of jeans that hug her body, and he must have been staring because Reno kicks him.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer," Reno says, and Rude's not sure if he ever flushes visibly, but his face feels hot. "Go up and talk to her, dumbass. At least order drinks," Reno adds.

So he goes, and he orders drinks, and she smiles at him and says "I haven't seen you around," and he kind of grunts. "I'm Tifa," she adds, and he says "Hi," and she grins and passes him the bottle and the glasses.

"Stop smiling, Rude, your face'll freeze like that," Reno says, as he returns to the table.

"...I'm smiling?" He's not, exactly - he pulls off his sunglasses to check his reflection in the lenses - but Reno makes a disgusted noise as he pours.

* * *

. 

The bar's almost empty, and he can see now how shabby and battered the mismatched furniture is, the care she's tried to take with the scuffed surface of the bar. He takes a seat at the end of it, looks down the way at the huge black man - scarred face, a hook in place of his right hand, and a perpetual scowl - and then at the broken jukebox, and then she says hi and he just looks at her. He thinks about love at first sight, which he doesn't even believe in, and about some stupid movie on cable last night where the guy tried reading poetry to some girl and of course he won her in the end, and he thinks about taking off his sunglasses. "Hey," he says. He leaves the shades on.

His business was in the Sector 6 slums, but he came this way for a drink. It's January, and down here it's cold - cold air sinks, he thinks, and the memory's in his mother's voice - but not enough for the heavy coat he wears against the wind and snow on the plate. It's dry here, and the air circulates because of ventilation systems, not because of weather. His tie is stuffed in his pocket, and he carried his suit jacket over his arm in the heated station lobby, though he needs to wear it in here.

"What brings you down here?" she asks. "You dress like you work on the plate."

"Business," he says. "And I liked your bar."

"Oh yeah, you've been here before..."

"Good memory for faces," he says.

"I didn't get your name, though."

He didn't give it. "Jackson Rudolph. People call me Rude."

Her mouth quirks. "They got your name backwards."

He almost smiles. "Yep."

"What kind of above-plate business brings you down here?" she asks.

"...the, uh, shady kind," he says, and she smiles a bit.

"I won't ask, then. As long as it's not Shinra, I figure it can't be too awful."

"...yeah," he agrees, and tosses back the shot.

He asks her where she's from, why she came to Midgar, and she says she wanted to get away from her tiny, backwoods hometown, "especially after the... the reactor fire," she says, and the hesitation and the way she slams bottles around for a bit until he asks about the music make him wonder if he ought to look in the files. She says she's from Nibelheim, and the name rings a faint bell.

She asks where he's from, and he says Junon. She asks what it's like there, and he thinks of fishing boats, fewer every year, and the mako wells being drilled, remembers the upper city overshadowing the village. Remembers his parents putting the house - old, but roomy - and the furniture up for sale, moving into a tiny flat with shabby furniture in the upper city, and coming home to an empty house after school because of the long hours his parents were working. "A lot like Midgar," he says. "In a way."

"Were you plate or slums there?" she asks.

"They didn't have a plate like that," he says. "My folks moved to the upper city later. Our apartment up there was a quarter of the size of our house down below, but you couldn't find work in the lower city." He never talks that much at a stretch - not to a pretty girl he barely knows. Not to Reno. Never.

"Why'd you come to Midgar?"

SOLDIER, at first. He'd enlisted at fifteen. Then special forces, and then the Turks. "...why not?" he says, finally.

She laughs mirthlessly. "I can think of lots of reasons," she says.

"Where else would you go?" he asks. He meant it as a real question, but it sounds like a rhetorical one once it's spoken.

"I don't know," she says, after a long moment.


	2. the new year

The bar's halfway full, and cooler than it is outside. Up on the plate it's a beautiful September day - light breeze, blue skies, sunshine. One of those days that make him wish he'd sprung for an apartment in the central plate, where they have parks and trees. He saves on rent, but his only window looks out on an alley. Under the plate, it's stuffy and humid, but in here the fans are working, and it has to be drawing people in. He sees her through the crowd, and he notices when she spots him, sees the recognition in her face and the beginning of a smile. "Rude!" she calls, and he makes his way to the bar, happier than he ought to be, heart hammering.

"You never come around here!" she says. "I keep trying to treat you like a regular, but you just won't work with me."

"...sorry," he says, pleased to note envious glances from a couple of the other men around the bar.

"Well, stay put, okay?" she says, and she slides a whiskey sour across to him, then picks up a tray of drinks and makes her way out from behind the bar. He stays until closing time, talking to her when he can - or speaking in monosyllables while she tries to draw him out, to be more accurate - and watching as the bar slowly begins to empty. He's the last one in there. Even her huge, surly black friend leaves, with a little girl who might be hers. "Your daughter?" he asks, after the door shuts behind those two.

"No, his. Adopted," she adds. "He and I aren't an item."

"Good," he says, quietly, and when she turns to face him, he actually smiles.

"You need to come around more," she says.

"Why?" he asks.

"Because... I don't know, you're just kind of... you're nice. Whenever you come around and we actually get a chance to talk, it's been... you need to do that more."

"I could buy you dinner," he says.

"At this time of night?" Things in the slums close earlier, he remembers. Theft insurance, security tapes, those are perks of Plate life. So is the police force.

"There are places on the plate that'd still be open. Not fancy places, but the food's good."

"You have one in mind?"

"Yeah." A late night after his first mission. They'd shot five men on a train, moved up several cars from the spot - on the second car away, he'd started shaking, and in the third, he stopped, stumbled in amongst the seats and retched uncontrollably until his stomach was empty. Reno waited on him, patted his shoulder, and handed him a handkerchief to wipe his mouth, his streaming eyes. He'd killed people before, during the war with Wutai and the cleanup, in battles, covert ops - it made no sense why this should hit him so hard. Tseng was waiting at the door to the next compartment. They'd split at the station. He bought a small bottle of water, and Reno waited while he rinsed out his mouth, spat, and drank the rest, then led the way to a burger place. It was the best food he'd ever eaten, and while they sat there talking and nursing drinks Reno had never once made reference to his moment of weakness. "Nothing special. Just a diner."

"Just a minute while I close up, then."

* * *

. 

The bar's crowded again, and a sugary Christmas carol is playing, heavy on the violins. He can tell when she sees him, because her face brightens. She waves at him over the crowd, and he lifts his hand in acknowledgment, shoulders his way through the crowd at the bar to reach her. "I didn't think you'd make it!" she says happily, half-shouting over the noise of the bar.

"I promised," he says, and the smile she gives him strikes him dumb. And then she leans over the bar to awkwardly land a peck on his lips. He should object. He shouldn't be seeing a Shinra-hating barmaid from the slums. He shouldn't smile at her, and then smirk at her glowering friend with the hook for an arm, but he does.

He shouldn't have taken her someplace Reno knew about, either. They'd spend a lot of time in her bar after closing time, talking as they cleaned up, but he could afford to show her the Plate and she'd admitted, finally, that she missed the open air, actual grass and sunlight. Sometimes they'd spend hours in parks on the Plate itself; other times he'd buy her dinner, and while he tried to keep it to places the other Turks didn't frequent, he wasn't flawless about it. The diner in question was an especially chancy spot, but they'd eaten there before with no problems.

Then, two weeks ago, they'd seen him there. The older Turk hadn't said a word to him, hadn't even acknowledged him at the time. The next day, when they were alone in the office, Reno had leaned against a filing cabinet, flipping his taser as if he were a drum majorette, and said "You know the process of falling for someone is a whole lot like the early stages of cocaine dependency?"

He'd just looked blank. "It's an addiction," Reno said. "Euphoria, withdrawal, all that shit. I mean, you know me, I'm all in favor of addictions. But they make you stupid, and I'm just saying, don't get stupid. There's a lot of unrest in the slums and you know that. And we all know they won't be able to bring Shinra down, but that doesn't mean we want to let them have any little victories, either."

"Like what?"

"Something happening to you. You dropping security information. Hell, I don't know what you talk about when you're screwing her."

He hadn't liked that, and it must have shown. Reno stopped playing with the taser. "Just be careful," he'd said, and then he'd left to join Tseng on the Gainsborough surveillance. And Rude had gone out for a walk, and ended up drifting through crowds, looking for some kind of gift for her, trying to forget Reno's words.

He'd found a gift, finally, and had it stuffed in his coat pocket now. A pair of fighter's gloves - he knew she could fight, had watched her doing katas sometimes when the bar was really empty, but she always went bare-handed. She didn't even know he was Shinra. She didn't have any ulterior motives. She couldn't. He kept his hand in his pocket, on the tissue paper wrapped around the gloves, and told himself Reno was being ridiculous. And then she smiled at him and the world felt right again.

Euphoria. So maybe it is a little like an addiction, he thinks, as he settles onto the barstool just vacated by the guy she'd almost elbowed when she kissed him. He'll stay there for hours - he always does - watching her, waiting patiently through long blank stretches between the times she comes back to talk to him. Just a few words here and there. Reno doesn't understand, he thinks.

Tifa's big, angry friend removes a couple of people on the verge of a fistfight, at one point. Others hold onto enough sense to take it outside before he gets involved. People begin filtering out, in pairs or larger groups, some singing, some despondent. Tifa calls "Merry Christmas!" after all of them, even though he sees weariness on her face, or annoyance - she knows almost everyone who comes in here. As the night wears on, people begin leaving alone, slumped and shuffling, or more often reeling a bit. That could be him, he thinks, if he cared about this holiday in the least. Or if it weren't for Tifa.

A couple of people come in with the little girl, and he fades back into a corner as Tifa hugs her and the others - friends, apparently - and small gifts are exchanged, and dirty looks are sent his way. They leave, in the end, and people call out "Merry Christmas" some more, and then the door closes and it's just the two of them.


	3. leaving

The bar's dark, silent, and it looks empty, but he knows it's not. He knows by sight all the people now inside it. Barret Wallace, her bouncer friend with the prosthetic arm - he has a gun where he used to use a hook, now. Wedge Antilles. Jessie Clavis. Justin Biggs. Someone new, with spiky blond hair and modified Shinra gear - he snapped some photos so they can try to trace him later. And Tifa.

Two months ago, they'd been sent a security tape from an Avalanche attack at a Mako pump station - three killed, another nine injured - and he'd immediately recognized Wallace as the killer. Closer study of the tape let him tentatively identify two others as regulars at the bar, friends of Tifa's. Other research had turned up Tifa, in company with them, at train stations during the windows of time around other attacks. Reno kept his mouth shut about the whole thing, except to come to his desk, after Tseng had left, to say "He doesn't know about her. Shouldn't have any idea unless you let something slip."

So now it's New Year's Eve, and he watches from the second floor of a condemned building so decrepit no squatters will touch it, and he keeps thinking of a year ago, two years ago, other December nights in that room. Two years ago, he met her. A year ago, he'd walked in, noticed that she barely acknowledged his presence, noticed the way she'd shooed her friends out, then shut the door, turned, and stalked right up to him.

"Something wrong?" he'd asked, knowing something was, and she'd said, voice low and rich with fury, "You _lied_ to me."

And that was how it ended. He remembers her screaming at him, about Shinra, about Nibelheim, her father cut down before her eyes and when she woke up in the hospital, they said she'd been hurt in a reactor fire, even though she'd been slashed open and they could all see her stitches. Shinra lied and killed and he did the same, and he'd lied to her, and then she was screaming at him to get out. When she shoved him, he noticed she was wearing the gloves he'd gotten her, and when he tried to approach her, she fell into a defensive position and he realized why. Realized she was actually afraid of him.

When he's staked the place out before, he's noticed she always wears those gloves.

That Christmas Eve everything had been perfect, except for the fact that he was still telling the lies that she'd kick him out for the next week. He'd given her the gloves, and she hadn't been able to stop smiling even as she said she didn't have anything for him. "You don't need to get me anything," he'd said, squeezing her hand, and she'd said he needed to come by her place after she closed up.

She still had the flat then. Four months later, she got evicted from it and moved in at the bar. He'd done his best, without fanfare or visible-to-her meddling, to delay it, but her landlord had eventually gone ahead over his threats and protests. Maybe he should have carried out some of the threats, but it was hard to justify a maiming on behalf of the girl who'd dumped you, no matter how much you weren't letting go.

The apartment was a neat, well-cared-for, one-room disaster; hard to blame her for not wanting to pay any rent for it. You couldn't have paid him to spend a night there without her. She'd done everything she could to it, obviously, and while the furniture was all shabby and secondhand and there wasn't much of it, she kept the place clean and she'd tacked up things torn out from magazines or calendars to brighten the walls. Scenery shots, mostly of mountains.

There was a tiny tree covered in red and gold sparkles on her chipped, stained, elderly kitchen counter, lights around her windows on the inside - "I like to look at them," she'd said, "and I'm not sure anybody else does" - and a wreath on the inside of the front door. She didn't really have a bed, just a mattress on the floor. He might have said that he loved her, he wasn't completely sure. He couldn't stop saying her name. She held onto him like one of them might float away, and he saw the long scar across her chest but didn't ask about it.

"Merry Christmas," she'd whispered, and kissed his shoulder, and he'd pulled her close and said "Just what I always wanted," and she'd giggled and said "We're being lame, you know," and he'd laughed too.

And a week later, she'd known somehow, and he hadn't spoken to her since then. A full year.

There's a basement only accessible through a hidden elevator, and they're planning something - probably something bigger than they've done before, he thinks, and that bothers him, because he doesn't want to kill Tifa but thinks he may have to.

He'd looked up Nibelheim, during one of many sleepless nights that had followed that New Year's Eve, and it did, at least, explain the anger, though he still couldn't quite follow what she'd expected Shinra to do - Sephiroth's rampage was no more a part of their plans than it had been of hers. But maybe she needed someone to blame, or maybe she'd just wanted acknowledgment, something other than a coverup. But that was Shinra's policy and his own job; he can't see another option easily.

That was the whole point, of course. That's why he'll never touch her again, doesn't expect to ever see her in person. That's why he bothered her landlord, and volunteered for surveillance duty, and why Reno tried to set him up with that tiny blonde rookie and the girl from Urban Development and the lab assistant, and why none of it does him any good.

* * *

.

The bar's called Turtle's Paradise, for reasons unknown to him. Elena's showing no further inclination to stir from it. She's upset - more upset that Corneo's men got the drop on her than she is about the danger she was in, he thinks - and the obvious solution to that is for her to drink herself into a stupor. It wouldn't be polite for Reno and Rude to let her do so alone. But she's substantially smaller than the two of them, and so she's napping on the table early in the evening while he and Reno are still working on their drinks.

And that's when Tifa comes in with Highwind, the would-be astronaut wanted in Palmer's death, and Yuffie, Godo's kid. The girl runs behind the bar, yammering about karaoke, and Highwind sits down, grumbling about his knees, but Tifa hesitates by the bar, and that's when Rude notices the bottle's getting low and stands up to get another.

She looks like she might bolt. "Off duty," he reminds her.

"Right. Okay. For how long?"

"Long as we're here."

"Oh."

"Tifa..." he says, and she looks over her shoulder at her friends. "I'm sorry," he says. Once he'd been so angry he wouldn't have dreamed of saying this to her, but he's had a lot of time to think. Her head snaps back, her mouth opens slightly. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he adds, keeping his voice low. No one seems to have noticed them. He'd bet money that Reno's watching, but he doesn't care. She cares, he knows, but she's not looking at Reno.

"But you _did,_" she says. "You're Shinra, you dropped the plate, you killed all those people–" She catches her voice rising and stops, folding her arms tightly over her chest. "You're tracking us and spying on us and fighting us and the people you work for are killing the Planet."

Not tracking them, really - tracking Sephiroth, the same thing they're doing. Avalanche is no longer a primary concern, now that they're not blowing up power plants and the people who work in them anymore. "...it's our job."

She sighs. "Then why are you talking to me now?"

"Think I'll ever get another chance?"

"How can you... act like that, like you really mean it when you say you're sorry, and then fight with us and try to kill us–"

"It's our job. It's nothing personal." He can't explain it any better than that. "Besides, I never tried to kill you."

"Oh, so those are just play weapons?"

"I never fought _you._ I fought your friends." It seems to dawn on her, then. Even when she attacked him, he didn't counter, just blocked if he could. He didn't know if she'd realized.

"That doesn't make it– that doesn't make up for anything," she stammers.

"What else can I do?" He sounds weary, he knows, but he can't help it.

She moves closer to him, and he might be holding his breath. "You could quit, you could–"

"I can't quit," he says. "Could you leave Avalanche?"

She pushes her hair off her face, staring at him defiantly. "That's different. And I _know_ you don't think everything Shinra does is right."

"...don't start." It's true. He used to say as much to her, sitting in her bar after closing, and he'd wax loquacious, half-intoxicated with feeling free to criticize Shinra's policies and not just their pay scale.

"You told me–"

"I know I did. But is Avalanche going to make things any better?"

"By saving the Planet, by–"

"Hey Tifa!" the girl yells, and they both jump, and she giggles and says "Get away from the creepy assassin and check this out!"

"You realize you're still on probation with us," Tifa snaps at her, but she moves away from him, quickly, as if relieved, and he goes over to the bartender, and when he returns to the table Reno doesn't say a word about her.


	4. forgiveness

_If you think that I could be forgiven_

The bar's dark - windowless, a hole in a cliff wall, lit only by torches and candles. He would have sworn it had better lamps the last time he was in here, but that was six months ago, before Meteor. He couldn't read the sign. He thinks it's called the Cosmo Candle, but isn't that the name of that big bonfire they keep burning all year round? He hits his knee on a bench and bites back a curse. He almost always keeps his shades on, but he can't see in this cave.

He'd recognize the voice in pitch blackness though. "Blessed fire," she says, the holiday greeting, and it sounds as unnatural coming from her as it does when he says it.

"Yeah," he says, unthinking, and it's too dark for the shades, so he removes them, fumbles them into his pocket, and blinks at the firelight on her face.

"Rude?"

"Yeah."

"I'm glad you made it out."

"...I... thanks."

"The drinks are free," she says, then adds, quickly, "It's a holiday thing."

"Oh," he says, and then he remembers what bars are for, and takes a seat in front of her, noting the bulky sweater, the plain homespun cloth of the loose pants she's wearing, much like the clothes he's seen on everyone else here. She's been here a while.

"What'll you have?" Tifa asks.

"Oh. Um. Whatever you're having."

"I wasn't having anything," she says, but she fixes two drinks, and when he sips his, it's eggnog, maybe not quite as cold as the room itself. Probably made from scratch; for all he could see she was mixing it up when he came in. It doesn't matter. He'd drink anything she put in front of him.

"You weren't at the festival," she says.

He'd watched it, from his rooms well up the cliff - he was welcome there, they'd all said, but he would have felt like an outsider in his Shinra suit, stained and faded but still tailored, machine-made cloth among all their homespun, natural-dyed finery. So he just stayed in his room. He was supposed to be reading, but that day and night there were to be no lights that hadn't come from that huge fire of theirs. So as the light had faded he'd had little to do but watch the dark shapes moving below him, gathering around the fire in the snow. It was a still night, and he could hear the singing, though he couldn't quite make out the words, and somehow it had affected him more than he'd thought, even though these traditions didn't mean a thing to him. But now he just shrugs.

"You would have been welcome, you know."

"...I didn't believe in what they stand for," he says. "Guess they proved me wrong."

She comes around the end of the bar. "It's not a debate."

He watches her settle on the end of one of the benches, her back against the table. "Sure about that?" he asks.

"I don't know." She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and her face disappears into shadow. "It's been... two years."

"Unless you count the time I arrested you in HQ, or the fights, or that time in Midgar."

"Or the time in Wutai." She stretches her legs. "Three since we met. Nearly."

He's glad she remembered. "What's the date?"

"It's the Solstice."

"The twenty-first, right? Ten days off." She just nods. He needs to say it again, even if the conversation's giving him no excuse. "Tifa, I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?" She lifts her head, and she looks like she might laugh or cry, it's hard to tell in the candlelight. Maybe he shouldn't have said anything. "For what? For dropping the plate? Sorry Shinra made Sephiroth, sorry about covering up what happened to Nibelheim? What are you sorry for?"

"...I just meant for lying to you." She laughs a bit, bitterly. "I'm sorry for all of it." He stops himself from adding, _even the parts I didn't know about and the ones I had no control over._ Because he could always have disobeyed orders, could always have quit rather than be a part of it. He stops himself from reminding her of Avalanche's death toll. There's too much that's probably unforgivable between them. Too much that probably should be unforgivable. "I can't change the past, Tifa."

She sighs, and even though she waits a long moment before she speaks, her voice is tight and unsteady. "Why couldn't you just tell me at the beginning?"

She'd said something about Shinra, hadn't she? He wants to think she did. That's probably not an excuse. "I don't know," he says. "I think you said you hated Shinra."

"I probably did. I did that a lot." She sounds tired. "Of all the ways to try to impress me."

He can't say anything to that. "I'm sorry."

She shakes her head, and her face is obscured again. "Did you know I was here?"

"No." She doesn't say anything else. "I was glad," he adds, finally.

"Come sit by me," she says, and he gets up, sits next to her on the bench. She finishes her drink, sets the empty glass on the table behind her, and when she's done her shoulder's touching his. He doesn't move.

"You don't need to work tonight?" he asks.

"Not really. I just... fidget with it. With the bar. I didn't want to go back to an empty room right after the festival. I stayed at the banquet part as long as I could, but it's so cold..."

"You're the only one here?" He finishes his drink, and before he can think better of it, puts his arm around her. She just resettles herself against his side.

"Everyone else went back home," she says, knowing what he meant. "And Cloud went up north, back to the City of the Ancients."

He winces. "I'm sorry."

She's looking up at him. "Don't be," she says, and seems to mean it. "I'm not waiting for him," she adds. "I've had plenty of time to think, living here."

He brushes the hair away from her face. It's getting harder and harder not to kiss her. "Good decision," he says. He wants to ask why, but he doesn't. She's warm against his side, and he's almost hesitant about breathing, not wanting to disturb her.

"What about the other Turks?"

"Junon," he says. "I just... felt like traveling."

"Reeve made it through, I know. Is he still with you?"

"Yeah. He's in Junon too. Hid under the Plate during Meteor."

"Who'd have thought that'd ever do anyone any good..." she says. "And he designed it, didn't he?"

"Said he never meant for people to live down there."

"Good. If he had meant for people to live there, I'd have to assume he's evil." He grins, and finds she's watching him, smiling. "It's been a long time since I saw you smile," she says. "You didn't do it much even when we were seeing each other."

"I don't do it much ever," he says, and she laughs.

"So they don't brainwash people."

"They just offered health insurance."

"Those fiends," she says, but his eyes have adjusted to the candlelight, and he can see the smile fade away, seriousness returning. "It could have been different, you know. If it weren't for Shinra." He can't say anything. "I wish it had been," she adds, softly.

_Me too,_ he thinks, and he says "Shinra's gone," thinking that was inane, foolish, but she just says "I know," and then she kisses him.

The candles are burning low by the time they leave the empty bar. Her room's higher up the cliff, and as they make their way up the rock stairwell, moving slowly on the snowy steps, he looks out over the rest of the canyon village, seeing bonfires everywhere, candles in windows. And a riot of stars in the sky, more than he'd ever seen back in the days of Mako power and plentiful electricity.

Her room's just that, a single room, tiny but lovingly cared for and colorfully decorated. The bathroom would pass for a closet. The walls are adobe, not wood-paneled like many of the shops he's seen. There's a fireplace set into the wall, simple wooden furniture, more throw rugs than seems entirely reasonable. They start a fire in her fireplace, which takes far too long, as their words condense and hang in midair even though they're indoors. She lights fresh candles and they bundle into her bed fully clothed, laughing about the cold and rubbing cold hands against each other, playfully at first.

By the time dawn comes, the room's only cold in the way any room is colder than blankets. He half-wakes when he hears the mattress creak. "Coffee or tea?" she asks.

"Whatever you want," he says, rolling over, and he hears a scraping - poking at the fire, he thinks - and finally he sits up, rubbing his eyes. She's wrapped in another blanket, one of several that had been draped over the chair last night, and standing in front of the window. When his feet hit the stone floor he suddenly understands about all the throw rugs, and he pulls the blanket off the bed to wrap it around himself as she'd done.

Her window faces east. When he comes up behind her he almost forgets about the chill of the floor. The dawn streaks the sky gold and pink against the blue of the night, and below in the morning twilight the bonfires are still burning. He wraps his blanket-draped arms around her, and she leans back into him, settling her arms over his. "Do you think you can stay here for a while?" she asks, barely above a whisper.

"As long as you want me to," he says. She squeezes his arm, and when she tilts her head back, she's beaming at him.


End file.
